Browsed by
Category: Biology

Swarming bacteria create an ‘impossible’ superfluid

Swarming bacteria create an ‘impossible’ superfluid

Comments 0 Comment

Charlie Wood writes: Outside of the imaginations of physics teachers, frictionless devices are hard to come by. But putting a bunch of swimming bacteria into a drop of water achieves just that: a fluid with zero resistance to motion. Incredibly, that resistance (or viscosity, as it’s properly known) can even go negative, creating a self-propelling liquid that might, say, turn a motor in a way that seems to defy the laws of thermodynamics. Recent work explains how bacteria conspire to…

Read More Read More

Humans cannot survive without them yet within a century the world’s insects may be extinct

Humans cannot survive without them yet within a century the world’s insects may be extinct

Comments 0 Comment

The Guardian reports: The world’s insects are hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”, according to the first global scientific review. More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could…

Read More Read More

Plankton that are both plant-like and animal-like are redefining marine ecology

Plankton that are both plant-like and animal-like are redefining marine ecology

Comments 0 Comment

Knowable magazine reports: Their color gave them away. Ecologist Diane Stoecker was looking at plankton in samples of ocean water from the dock in Woods Hole Harbor in Massachusetts some 40 years ago when she spotted something strange. Under the microscope, she recognized Laboea strobila, shaped like an ice-cream cone — “yellowish green and very beautiful,” she recalls — and the smaller, more spherical Strombidium species — also oddly greenish. Stoecker knew that these single-celled critters, named ciliates for the…

Read More Read More

Evidence mounts that gut bacteria can influence mood, prevent depression

Evidence mounts that gut bacteria can influence mood, prevent depression

Comments 0 Comment

Science magazine reports: Of all the many ways the teeming ecosystem of microbes in a person’s gut and other tissues might affect health, its potential influences on the brain may be the most provocative. Now, a study of two large groups of Europeans has found several species of gut bacteria are missing in people with depression. The researchers can’t say whether the absence is a cause or an effect of the illness, but they showed that many gut bacteria could…

Read More Read More

Inside the struggle to define life

Inside the struggle to define life

Comments 0 Comment

Ian Sample writes: All the brain cells of life on Earth still cannot explain life on Earth. Its most intelligent species has uncovered the building blocks of matter, read countless genomes and watched spacetime quiver as black holes collide. It understands much of how living creatures work, but not how they came to be. There is no agreement, even, on what life is. The conundrum of life is so fundamental that to solve it would rank among the most important…

Read More Read More

As climate warms, plants will absorb less carbon dioxide

As climate warms, plants will absorb less carbon dioxide

Comments 0 Comment

The New York Times reports: The last time the atmosphere contained as much carbon dioxide as it does now, dinosaurs roamed what was then a verdant landscape. The earth’s lushness was at least partly caused by the abundance of CO₂, which plants use for photosynthesis. That has led to the idea that more CO₂ in the atmosphere could create a literally greener planet. Today, plants and soil around the world absorb roughly a quarter of the greenhouse gases that humans…

Read More Read More

Insect collapse: ‘We are destroying our life support systems’

Insect collapse: ‘We are destroying our life support systems’

Comments 0 Comment

The Guardian reports: “We knew that something was amiss in the first couple days,” said Brad Lister. “We were driving into the forest and at the same time both Andres and I said: ‘Where are all the birds?’ There was nothing.” His return to the Luquillo rainforest in Puerto Rico after 35 years was to reveal an appalling discovery. The insect population that once provided plentiful food for birds throughout the mountainous national park had collapsed. On the ground, 98%…

Read More Read More

How beauty is making biologists rethink evolution

How beauty is making biologists rethink evolution

Comments 0 Comment

Ferris Jabr writes: A male flame bowerbird is a creature of incandescent beauty. The hue of his plumage transitions seamlessly from molten red to sunshine yellow. But that radiance is not enough to attract a mate. When males of most bowerbird species are ready to begin courting, they set about building the structure for which they are named: an assemblage of twigs shaped into a spire, corridor or hut. They decorate their bowers with scores of colorful objects, like flowers,…

Read More Read More

Emergence: How complex wholes arise from simple parts

Emergence: How complex wholes arise from simple parts

Comments 0 Comment

John Rennie writes: You could spend a lifetime studying an individual water molecule and never deduce the precise hardness or slipperiness of ice. Watch a lone ant under a microscope for as long as you like, and you still couldn’t predict that thousands of them might collaboratively build bridges with their bodies to span gaps. Scrutinize the birds in a flock or the fish in a school and you wouldn’t find one that’s orchestrating the movements of all the others….

Read More Read More

Cells talk in a language that looks like viruses

Cells talk in a language that looks like viruses

Comments 0 Comment

Carrie Arnold writes: For cells, communication is a matter of life and death. The ability to tell other members of your species — or other parts of the body — that food supplies are running low or that an invading pathogen is near can be the difference between survival and extinction. Scientists have known for decades that cells can secrete chemicals into their surroundings, releasing a free-floating message for all to read. More recently, however, scientists discovered that cells could…

Read More Read More

The sugar that makes up DNA could be made in space

The sugar that makes up DNA could be made in space

Comments 0 Comment

Science News reports: Parts of DNA can form in space. For the first time, scientists have made 2-deoxyribose, the sugar that makes up the backbone of DNA, under cosmic conditions in the lab by blasting ice with radiation. The result, reported December 18 in Nature Communications, suggests that there are several ways for prebiotic chemistry to take place in space, and supports the idea that the stuff of life could have been delivered to Earth from elsewhere. “It tells us…

Read More Read More

The discovery of vast populations of subsurface microbial beings is shaking up what we think we know about life

The discovery of vast populations of subsurface microbial beings is shaking up what we think we know about life

Comments 0 Comment

JoAnna Klein writes: At the surface, boiling water kills off most life. But Geogemma barossii is a living thing from another world, deep within our very own. Boiling water — 212 degrees Fahrenheit — would be practically freezing for this creature, which thrives at temperatures around 250 degrees Fahrenheit. No other organism on the planet is known to be able to live at such extreme heat. But it’s just one of many mysterious microbes living in a massive subterranean habitat…

Read More Read More

Our world and our brains have been profoundly shaped by bees

Our world and our brains have been profoundly shaped by bees

Comments 0 Comment

Tim Flannery writes: According to Thor Hanson’s Buzz, the relationship between bees and the human lineage goes back three million years, to a time when our ancestors shared the African savannah with a small, brownish, robin-sized bird—the first honeyguide. Honeyguides are very good at locating beehives, but they are unable to break into them to feed on the bee larvae and beeswax they eat. So they recruit humans to help, attracting them with a call and leading them to the…

Read More Read More

What a newfound kingdom means for the tree of life

What a newfound kingdom means for the tree of life

Comments 0 Comment

Jonathan Lambert writes: The tree of life just got another major branch. Researchers recently found a certain rare and mysterious microbe called a hemimastigote in a clump of Nova Scotian soil. Their subsequent analysis of its DNA revealed that it was neither animal, plant, fungus nor any recognized type of protozoan — that it in fact fell far outside any of the known large categories for classifying complex forms of life (eukaryotes). Instead, this flagella-waving oddball stands as the first…

Read More Read More

‘Self-aware’ fish raises questions about mirror test

‘Self-aware’ fish raises questions about mirror test

Comments 0 Comment

Elizabeth Preston writes: A little blue-and-black fish swims up to a mirror. It maneuvers its body vertically to reflect its belly, along with a brown mark that researchers have placed on its throat. The fish then pivots and dives to strike its throat against the sandy bottom of its tank with a glancing blow. Then it returns to the mirror. Depending on which scientists you ask, this moment represents either a revolution or a red herring. Alex Jordan, an evolutionary…

Read More Read More